The traffic on the road into Pembroke is the first sign. Every year around the end of June the cars start coming in with tags from Maryland, Michigan, Georgia and Texas, and the line at the gas station by the highway goes out the door. Wes calls it the only week of the year Pembroke has a rush hour.
Lumbee Homecoming is a week in late June into early July when people come home to Pembroke from wherever life took them. Wes's family is Lumbee, and he grew up there. His mother Shirley still lives in Pembroke, and so does his sister Tonya. For that week, the trip we take is about twelve minutes long.
Why we stay home that week
When we made our one-trip-a-month rule in January, Wes looked at the calendar and put his finger on Homecoming week before I'd even turned the page. "That one's spoken for," he said. It wasn't a debate.
Part of it is family. Wes has cousins who live four states away and come home once a year, and that week is when he sees them. Part of it is his mother, who would never say she minds if we're gone and would remember it for ten years if we were. And part of it is that it's simply a good week. There's a parade, there are cookouts in every other yard and there's music and visiting late into the evening. You don't drive four hours to find a weekend like that when it's happening twelve minutes away.
We had our June trip already, a pet-friendly cabin near the Uwharrie, and we came home from that one with a few days to unpack before Homecoming started. The trip account got to rest.
The food we wait for
I married into a family that takes food seriously, and Homecoming is when it shows. There's fried fish, plenty of it, and Wes's uncles have opinions about cornmeal that I've learned not to question. There's chicken and pastry. There are collard sandwiches, which if you didn't grow up around here sounds strange until you've had one. There's banana pudding at every gathering, and every aunt's version is the best one if you ask her directly.
Shirley always makes a big pot of something and has opinions about my cornbread. This year I brought a pan anyway. She said it was "real nice," which in her language means it needed more grease. Wes ate three pieces, which I'm choosing to count as the final word.
What a stay-home week costs
I still keep the receipts, out of habit, but this week comes out of our regular money, not the trip account. Here's roughly what we spent:
- Food we brought to family gatherings (cornbread, a big pan of baked beans, two watermelons, drinks): about $68
- Food we bought from vendors and church sales over the week: about $42
- A T-shirt for Wes, because he wears the old ones until they're see-through: $20
- Gas for running back and forth to Pembroke: about $14
That's around $144 for a full week of good food and family. A night in a beach motel costs about that. I'm not saying that to make it sound like a bargain. It's just a different kind of spending, the kind that goes into the people you'll call when the car breaks down.
The whole reason we started taking cheap monthly trips was that we'd spent a lot on two big vacations and couldn't remember much about either one. Homecoming is the opposite. We don't spend much, we don't go anywhere and I could tell you something specific about every year since 2011: the year Wes's cousin got lost coming in from Charlotte, the year it stormed during the parade and everybody stood under the same carport, the year Wes's father, who passed in 2019, sat in a folding chair and told the same fishing story to six different people.
June stays home that week too, mostly in the air conditioning, because the fireworks around the Fourth undo her completely. She'd rather be under our bed than anywhere near a celebration.
By the time the out-of-state tags start heading back up I-95, we're tired, full and already talking about where July's trip will be. Probably somewhere with a lake and not a lot of people. We earned a quiet one.
